Sunday, July 11, 2010

James Hopkin's Perceptional Superior Intelligence

You really won't believe your eyes, but this time, it will trick your eyes so you will have to look twice. British artist James Hopkins forces the rules of art with his clever, actually we must say genious, ideas. He questions mortality, time, balance, booze, and above all, "perception" in his art. We can really see that each piece of his art takes serious time and trouble to create those visual illusions.

The painstakingly balanced chairs and tables are actually balanced, there is no trick there, and the alcohol is carefully measured into the bottles to counterbalance the pieces.

Anamorphic sculptures are also one of his favourite arts. As a viewer, as you move around the objects, at one specific point they all align to reveal their true subject. And this is usually a set of Pop Culture cartoon characters like The Simpsons;

or the main protagonists from South Park. In the case of Tom & Jerry or Cat & Mouse, there is an added level of complexity as each of these objects that creates the scene, represents the tools that the cartoon characters try kill each other with, in the Tv series, such as; a gun, a knife, a bomb and so on.

His warped, extended musical instrument series also play with your sense of perspective. The first of these instruments was finished in 2001 while he was still a student in Goldsmiths College.

And there is a really creepy stretched skull that Hans Holbein The Younger included in his iconic painting "The Ambassadors."

In fact, Holbein's influence is felt in another projects of Hopkin's too, his Vanitas series. Objects belonging to imagined archetypes are arranged on shelves, revealing the face of a skull when seen from a distance. Especially the attention on the choice of the products is brilliant.